Hello. Would someone be able to help? I have an animation that was assembled in Blender back in April 2025 and exported as an alembic file to Houdini. I chose alembic because I bought a lightning sim node network setup from a Houdini artist on Gumroad, and it requires an alembic file at the top of the network. Once in Houdini, I was able to relink my character to its materials using a materials node and a matnet node as laid out in the maker's node network. In the matnet node, I navigated to my image files, and all was well.

After working on it for a while, I needed to tweak the animation and went back to Blender. Weeks later, I had an animation I was happy with. Once again, I exported an .abc file to Houdini. BUT this time, the materials won't relink.

Since it's the same character, I thought I only had to select the alembic node at the top of the network and navigate to my revised .abc file. Doing this did replace the original mesh with the revised, but the materials disappeared. Navigating back to the original, the materials reappeared. I even merged the original April export with the revised October export using a merge node. The original April version (exported in April) gets the materials, but the revised October version does not.

In one test, I went back to my April Blender file and re-exported the original animation. I can't relink the materials to that either. In the export process from Blender, I tried selecting and deselecting a number of parameters, but no luck.

What am I doing wrong?